Facebook engineer quits over iPad app

By Suzanne Choney

Like a lot of other iPad enthusiasts, Jeff Verkoeyen has been patiently waiting and waiting for Facebook to release its iPad app for a long time. A Facebook app for the tablet is a natural, especially when it comes to looking at photos and videos posted by friends, as well as tracking those seemingly endless streams of comments.

But Verkoeyen is not just an ordinary iPad user. He was the lead engineer at Facebook working on the Facebook iPad app?? which, as AllThingsD points out, Facebook "has never officially acknowledged." And he was apparently frustrated by the Facebook foot-dragging on the app, supposedly ready since May, quit and has now gone over to Google. (There's a lot of team-switching between? the two companies.)

Some of Verkoeyen's comments on his blog talked about his frustrations, and those comments have now been removed. He contacted The Next Web to say that he wanted it to be known he clearly enjoyed working at Facebook (which, while likely true, is a wise thing for any employee leaving a company to say, in case he or she ever wants to come back). According to The Next Web:

... The frustrations surrounding the delayed release of the iPad app may have been a factor in his leaving the company, but they weren?t the only reasons that he had to move on.

... He says that while the app was ?feature complete? it was definitely not ready for public consumption. He says that there were definitely bugs and issues with the app that still needed working out. Although his post indicated that the development of the app slowed after his initial push in May, he says that it is still a ?continually evolving? app. Verkoeyen wanted to stress the fact that ?feature complete? and ?complete? are two very different concepts.

Perhaps Facebook has delayed the iPad app because of the recent changes it announced, with some of them being rolled out in the next several weeks. Among those are the addition of the story-telling Timeline. And it seems that Facebook has its own timeline for the iPad.

? Via The Next Web

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Source: http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/09/26/7975582-facebook-engineer-quits-frustrated-over-no-ipad-app

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